Reading

What made me fall in love with books was the flair of my mother,
Rhoda, in reading aloud to her children growing up in Cape Town. She
read Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand stories, where the children
lead lives like ours at the Cape and, reading dramatically – taking
multiple roles - the whole of A Tale of Two Cities in a room darkened
against the sun when I had measles.

That year, aged eleven, I objected to her bedtime choice of Treasure
Island.
‘It’s a boy’s book.’‘You don’t have to listen’, she countered.
Crossly, I stamped out of the room and banged the door against the
sight of her and my brother under the lamplight. Her voice carried faintly
into the passage, as sinister Long John Silver arrived on the scene. It
was so compelling that, though I was too stubborn to give in, I tiptoed to
the door and stood with my ear pressed against it.

So, in childhood, I heard the pulse of language: the throb of the Dickens
sentence (‘It is a far, far better thing...’); the humorous pathos of
Afrikaans phasing in the folk life of the veld in The Little Karoo by
Pauline Smith, which Rhoda pronounced with the intonations of a native
speaker (she grew up in Klawer on the edge of Namaqualand), pausing
to recall the country-folk of her own childhood; and I heard too the
arduous plod of Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’ – that spiritual journey like
Rhoda’s own. She taught me how to see and feel; my perceptions are in
truth hers.

Four Innovative Biographies

Reading Chekhov by Janet Malcolm shows stories growing out of the
Russian landscapes. Chronology proves less important than forays into
the inner life in its physical surroundings. Slid into the book is a critique
of the genre: Malcolm shows up six biographers who give different
versions of the facts of Chekhov's death. How slippery, how hard-won is
truth.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson. The
fascination of Dorothy Wordsworth lies in two things most of us wish
to experience: creativity and depth of feeling. For Dorothy, the two
are interfused in her scrutiny of nature and in her closeness to her
brother, the Romantic poet, William Wordsworth. Separated as children,
they come together in Dorothy’s late twenties when they roam the
countryside and share a cottage. During Dorothy’s childhood she lived
in others’ homes, and after William’s marriage, she will be again a third
party. Frances Wilson has made a boldly original decision to focus on
the few years of Dorothy’s creative union with her brother, a life wholly
given to poetry at the high point of her brother’s output. Part of the
fascination of reading this book is the way it stretches our capacity for
feeling out rarities of apprehension between the facts. For though it’s
impossible to define genius, this book takes readers as close as we can
go.

Her Husband: Hughes and Plath – A Marriage by Diane Middlebrook
is a dual portrait about what marriage can do to develop literary
stars. Turning away from the public fixation on Plath’s suicide and
the standard story of a destructive union, Middlebrook’s heartening
research reveals the extent of Hughes’ and Plath’s co-operation and
mutual encouragement as poets. Sometimes they use the same
paper to draft their works. Middlebrook sustains our curiosity about the
integration of domesticity and children with ambitions on the Hughes-
Plath scale.

The Convert by Debbie Baker, published by a small press in the U.S., is
a biography of an unknown woman, a Jewish New Yorker who converts
to Islam and makes a new life in Pakistan. The originality of this work
lies in its blend of delicacy and the questioning determination of its
approach to a subject who has twisted her story in the mass of papers
she donated to the New York Public Library. The biographer takes you
with her into the archive with its grey boxes, and you sit at her side as
she peels away outer layer after layer until she comes literally face to
face with the convert manifesting the killer ethos of the Islamic terrorist.
What a meeting of biographer and subject: it deserves to be a classic of
the genre.

After-Lives

The Brontë Myth by Lucasta Miller is an innovative
book of a different kind: an intellectual history, as one
ephemeral and often absurd theory succeeds another,
catching up the famous sisters. This opened up a
new way of looking at lives through the lens of what
happens afterwards, demonstrating our need to peel back
accretions of legend. When Lucasta and I met in 1993,
I was working on a chapter called ‘Surviving’ to follow
Charlotte life, which started with Mrs Gaskell’s biography
of 1857. It was fascinating to read a draft of The Brontë
Myth, which brought out the after-life as a full-length
subject, in effect a critique of biography itself.

Since ‘Surviving’ in 1993, I’ve looked longer at the
mythical accretions in the after-lives of my subjects.
While I was writing Vindication I decided to add four
chapters to follow Mary Wollstonecraft’s interrupted life
with the reverberations of that life for her daughters and
followers in the next generation. An editor to whom I was
assigned for a while at Penguin resisted this. ‘Lives end
in deathbeds’, she said flatly. Not always, I thought, and
certainly not so with one as influential as Wollstonecraft.

In a biography of Emily Dickinson, the first half the
book looks back to her volcanic character in the context
of a family feud which blew up during her lifetime and
which, bizarrely, remains active to this day, distorting the
poet to suit opposing camps. The second half of the book
tells this story of a ferocious and ongoing feud and the
ways it promoted a myth that wrapped itself around Emily
Dickinson, and obscures her still.

Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the
World by Claire Harmon is an amusing history of the
novelist’s afterlife. Harmon relates how Jane Austen was
remodelled as inoffensive “dabbler,” and then mounted
on a pedestal as ‘Divine Jane’. Once fame is on the way,
families strive to control it. So the Austen family alters
an ‘ugly’ portrait of the novelist, to promote an image of
pretty, modest, retiring lady. Harmon undercuts this with
a teasing denial from Jane Austen herself: ‘I write only for
Fame.’

Essays

The essay as a genre has always thrived in America. A favourite essay
is on ‘The Palm House’ at Kew Gardens. It’s in Of Gardens, by Paula
Deitz, a collection of essays mostly written for the New York Times.
This essay, like a perfectly composed poem or work of art, lifts us out of
our disorderly existence and transplants us in the realm of design.

Lynn Freed's collection of autobiographical essays about Leaving Home,
published by Harcourt, has a special place in my heart, especially the
trauma of a schoolgirl from South Africa who comes to America on a
field service scholarship and, being Jewish, is assigned to a Jewish
family whose tastes and habits are totally incompatible with those of her
own literate theatre family back in Durban: I loved Lynn's treatment of
this hilarious mismatch, but more important is the deep, bonding subject
of expatriation.

I delight in the honesty and self-mocking humour of New Yorker Phillip
Lopate, have read every one of his essays, and wish there were more.

In England the essay thrived in the eighteenth century. An all-
time favourite is Dr Johnson on Detractors. The most damage
to reputation is done not by the "Roarers", nor even by more
dangerous "Whisperers", but by that "most pernicious enemy", the "man
of Moderation" - he who "discovers failings with unwillingness, and
extenuates the faults which cannot be denied."

Novels

Homemaking for the Down-at-Heart, by prize-winning poet (the Olive
Schreiner award) and novelist, Finuala Dowling, is a funny, rueful story
of a night-time radio communicator who, in different ways by night and
day, lends herself to other lives and carries them on. Her heroism as
her aged mother’s carer combined with her life as a single mother
is a domestic epic sung without bravado. A flair for the absurdities of
dialogue, especially the self-absorption of unpromising men on blind
dates. I finished this novel sorry to stop living with these characters.
This novel is as terrific as the author's previous novel, Flyleaf, where
we see the impact of words on our lives through the experience of a
divorced and struggling language teacher.

Zakes Mda, The Madonna of Excelsior (Oxford/ Farrar Straus). A novel
based on an incident in 1971 in a South African dorp. Under the
notorious laws of apartheid, leading citizens were charged in court
with "immorality" - sleeping with local black women who worked as
servants in their homes. This novel transcends its sensational origins;
it celebrates an African tradition of generosity and mutual support -
offering a vision of hope for the new South Africa in the face of political
corruption and the ravages of AIDS.

Leonard Woolf (publisher of the Hogarth Press) remarked that best-
sellers are ‘second-rate’ books. He’s talking of course about lasting
literature. I believe that if he and Virginia Woolf were alive now their
discerning eyes would have welcomed original fictions by Judith
Ravenscroft (My Life with Belle and The Way We Loved, to be
completed by a third novella as a trilogy) and by Karina M. Szczurek
(Invisible Others, published in 2014 by Protea in South Africa). Each
in her way develops an inward voice of a scarred woman living largely
in solitude -- I’m drawn to these women who appear as new creatures
crawling out from under the stone of history (to steal a phrase from
Virginia Woolf). Leonard Woolf’s conclusion can’t be applied universally:
it obviously can’t apply to Dickens. Nor to deserved best-seller, Alica
Munro (see Stories below). Nor to Anne Tyler who is always perceptive
about people on the margins, wives in particular, as in my favourites
amongst her novels: Breathing Lessons and The Ladder of Years.

I enjoyed Alice Mattison's Jewish-America novel Hilda and Pearl about
two sisters of her mother's generation, putting the domestic affections
at the centre of existence, as I feel they should be in place of public
norms of aggression and power represented by politicians, disgraced
bankers and the destruction of awareness promoted by corporate
greed. I greatly admired Mattisons epic novel of Jewish-American life
from the Thirties, When We Argued All Night.

Fictional biography is not a genre I’m drawn to because unless
it’s as brilliant as Richard III, it’s too unconvincing. Verifiable fact can
often be more amazing than fancy. I can’t believe, for instance, that
Thomas Cromwell had much to redeem him, in view of Holbein’s telling
portrait of a sly-eyed butcher. A notable exception is the inwardness of
Miss Fuller, poet April Bernard’s imaginative portrait of Margaret Fuller.

At the Edinburgh Festival one August, I picked up Candia
McWilliam's novel, A Little Stranger, an absorbing read, drawing us into
a relationship between a pregnant woman who is eating compulsively
and a too-perfect nanny. McWilliam's extraordinarily fertile vocabulary
brings out the nuances of strange situations. After that I read her stories
with the same intent pleasure in her siftings of character in distinctive
Scottish settings. I was drawn into her memoir of blindness, What
To Look for in Winter – drawn particularly by what seemed to me a
Jamesian sensitivity to language and experience.

Stories

The expanded time scale that Alice Munro packs into her stories
through flash-backs and startling flash-forwards have something of
the pathos of Hardy who takes the reader close to an individual like
Tess, and then shocks you with a long-shot of two girls crawling like
flies across a grey landscape --motes in creation. Munro gives us this
continuum of existence, its humanity and tragedy.

Katherine Mansfield, The Montana Stories from Persephone Press: puts
together, in chronological order, the great stories of her last months. My
favourite is the frieze of family scenes in her longer New Zealand story
At the Bay, a sequel to Prelude. My mother, a devotee of Mansfield, read
this story aloud when I was a child - a mirror of our own family: sporting
father, dreaming mother, beside the sea.

Lynn Freed's collection, The Curse of the Appropriate Man. As South
African expatriates at Columbia University, Lynn and I met in Lionel
Trilling’s seminar on Wordsworth in 1967 (described in Shared Lives).
Freed's story of a Jewish girl arriving in New York and finding herself
misplaced with a Jewish family, and then misplaced again with a WASP
family, is a deliciously comic take on being new and alien in America.
I admire the acumen all Lynn has done as a novelist, essayist and
accomplished lecturer. It’s reminiscent of the incisiveness of those two
great detectives of human nature, Chaucer and Jane Austen.

Memoir

Two New York memoirs by Joyce Johnson, Minor Characters: A Beat
Memoir and Missing Men should be classics of the genre. I found them
more absorbing for the story of the author herself than for her Beat
milieu including Kerouac. This is a portrait of a responsible woman
who lends herself to the creativity of irresponsible men in the fifties.
The ethos of the time is for a woman to prop up a man but the reader
feels the proto-feminist passion of the author and wonders at her
extraordinary resilience in tough situations.

A little boast: Persephone books took up my suggestion that they reprint
Hilda Bernstein's domestic memoir of a woman's political life at the
height of apartheid, The World that Was Ours. It was published (2004)
with a new foreword by the author, bringing out what she and other
determined women achieved, through protest in prison, during the
Treason Trials of the late fifties. A review by Albie Sachs notes how
well this book endures to speak to a new generation. The fact is Hilda
Bernstein can write. Her calibre reminds me what Eliot said: there's no
substitute for being very intelligent.

There has been a surge of memoirs on the impact of the holocaust on
the second generation. I was gripped by Lisa Appignanesi’s portrait of
her mother, a Jew who passed as Polish and used this advantage with
extraordinary instinct and daring to preserve her family throughout the
war. I admired too Eva Hoffman’s After Such Knowledge and an earlier
memoir that is already a classic, Lost in Translation. Two stories. Two
languages. There’s the daughter of holocaust survivors growing up in
postwar Poland. And then, across a mute divide, there’s an adolescent
transplanted against her will to the New World. Her unmaking and
remaking as a writer is relayed in terms of language. Tesknota, Polish
for nostalgia, echoes with ‘tonalities of sadness and longing’. English,
by contrast, appears a language of ‘will and abstraction’. At the core of
this memoir are inward debates between different mentalities shaped by
language. The triumph is that Eva Hoffman is far from lost in translation;
her loss provokes a language of her own. She is unafraid of words
like ‘triangulate’ and ‘bituminous’. Her introspective and unashamedly
serious vocabulary is extended beyond the range of native speakers.
Readers are drawn into her crossings, as into friendship which in Polish,
we’re told, carries the strongest connotations of ‘attachment bordering
on love’.

Poems

Carole Satyamurti has completed a 700-page translation of the Indian
epic, the Mahabarata (Norton). I was privileged to read a bit of the final
draft and impressed by the drama and clarity.

At night, when I can't sleep for thinking about the fate of books, it's
cheering to read Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711) with its distilled
judgements - What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd.

Isobel Dixon looks at creatures with a dazzling, playful eloquence in The
Tempest Prognosticator. Her 'Postcard from the Colonies', playing out an
image of a monkey with the face of one-time foreign minister, Malcolm
Rivkind, is haunted by the contours of the Africa colonials encountered
and imprinted with their weird ways. It recalls the first poem of hers
I read, a surreal, intrepid swim from England to South Africa, which
spoke to me strongly of expatriate separation and dreaming. I loved too
the tenderness of 'Meet My Father' in a previous collection, A Fold in the
Map.

I’m particularly drawn to the work of three unpublished poets. The
poems of Faith Williams, a school librarian in Washington DC, blend the
largest issues with domestic life in a quirky, edgy, humorous way that's
reminiscent of Emily Dickinson.

Kieron Winn: a one-time pupil now teaching in Oxford, is unafraid of the
big subjects. A refreshing contrast to a stale fashion for small ironies.

The third is Rhoda Press. Her visionary poems come together as a
spiritual journey emanating from illness and the African landscape.